Testing Collaborative Combat Aircraft—the unmanned, autonomous aircraft that will fly alongside crewed fighters with the goal of beefing up the future Air Force fleet—will require an unprecedented integration of effort from engineers and operators, leaders of the service’s test enterprise said in a recent interview ...
The first of 10 EC-37 Compass Call electronic warfare aircraft was delivered to the Air Force on Sept. 12, contractors BAE Systems and L3Harris announced. The jets will complement the current EC-130s and will be supplemented by—but not replaced by—the emerging Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) ...
New details of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program—and how it will work together with similar efforts in the Navy—will emerge from AFA’s Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in September, USAF’s program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft said.
The Air Force’s approach to developing Collaborative Combat Aircraft—the uncrewed, autonomous drones to fly alongside manned aircraft—will “break the mold” of traditional acquisition and sustainment, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. said July 31. For years, Brown told attendees at the Air Force Life ...
Northrop Grumman won’t bid on the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, but might go after the Navy's F/A-XX and Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs, company CEO Kathy Warden said July 27.
The Air Force’s request for funding for the Next Generation Air Dominance program is slashed nearly a third—some $550 million—in the House Armed Services Committee chairman's mark of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. But while the amount of the reduction roughly matches what the ...
China has structured its military to defeat the U.S. “kill chain”—the sequence of steps needed to spot and destroy particular targets—and the Air Force must now ensure its process is agile and resilient, largely by investing in new platforms and networks, an expert from the ...
The Air Force plans to get production of the classified AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile underway this year and will equip its new Collaborative Combat Aircraft with the weapon, senior USAF leaders said at a Senate Armed Services Hearing.
A GAO official told the House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon still doesn’t have a portfolio-wide plan for tactical aviation, which would help itself and Congress identify true priorities and avoid duplication of effort. He also said the agency is worried that the F-35’s ...
The Collaborative Combat Aircraft will be operational in the late 2020s, several years before the Next-Generation Air Dominance family of systems, Air Force officials told the House Armed Services tactical aviation panel. The CCAs will first be “shooters,” then electronic warfare platforms, then sensors, in ...
Though touted as “loyal wingmen,” Collaborative Combat Aircraft may not always be paired with crewed aircraft and may function only in concert with one another or weapons in “swarms,” the better to complicate an enemy’s ability to track and counter them, senior Air Force CCA ...
The Air Force is asking for about $6 billion to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft over the future years defense plan, up from a get-started amount of nearly $400 million in fiscal 2024. One of the first types of CCAs will be for “spectrum warfare,” but ...